Shared storage for Proxmox VE 2.1 on HP Microserver N40L

[Ezy]

Hello,

I have small Proxmox cluster with 3 nodes. Each has a quad core cpu, 16gb ram and ONE hard disk. Obviously, that's just enough for testing and I want to give a shared storage to this. I plan to go with a HP MicroServer N40L with 5 Disks with raidz/zfs on OpenIndiana or Solaris 11.

Should I go with iSCSI storage configuration or is NFS sharing enough?

After having the shared storage, and all VMs on it, do I need a harddisk on each cluster node at all? I could replace those with a small SSD for the Proxmox VE operating system and the basic machine data, maybe I can even use an USB stick. Any ideas / comments ? Thanks!

 

[hotwired007]

maybe I can even use an USB stick

I tried a USB stick, it was very slow and i wouldnt expect them to last too long as there is constant IO which will eventually break the USB stick i'd stick with the traditional HDD over SSD as you wont really gain any improvement from the SSD, put the money towards your storage server

 

[udo]

Hello,

I have small Proxmox cluster with 3 nodes. Each has a quad core cpu, 16gb ram and ONE hard disk. Obviously, that's just enough for testing and I want to give a shared storage to this. I plan to go with a HP MicroServer N40L with 5 Disks with raidz/zfs on OpenIndiana or Solaris 11.

Should I go with iSCSI storage configuration or is NFS sharing enough?

After having the shared storage, and all VMs on it, do I need a harddisk on each cluster node at all? I could replace those with a small SSD for the Proxmox VE operating system and the basic machine data, maybe I can even use an USB stick. Any ideas / comments ? Thanks!

Hi,
iscsi and nfs has both pro and cons. If you want to use openvz with shared storage you need nfs.
For kvm I don't have experiences with nfs - only with DRBD/FC/iSCSI.

Udo

 

[mlanner]

For speed, consider putting in two small SSDs as cache and log disks. It should greatly improve the performance of your storage machine. I've run FreeNAS 8 on the N36L. The speed is OK, but it would be much better with caching and ZIL SSDs. Perhaps OpenIndiana or Solaris would do better than FreeNAS, but the SSDs would definitely speed things up no matter what.